1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′
4. ‘A Scanner Darkly’
5. ‘Avatar’
6. ‘Donnie Darko’
7. ‘Star Trek’
8. ‘Minority Report’
9. ‘Cloverfield’
10. ‘Serenity’

CoM, check; Moon, looked good, but it didn’t keep me awake; District 9, not — why South Africa? — and on and on. I am just incapable of becoming excited by most of these titles. Minority Report was interesting because of it’s Philip K. Dick cachet (and the fact that it was made during Bush II) , but very few of those movies had the **umph** of the movies I grew up on. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I feel as though I’ve lived a charmed life, given that the following came out during the period that sanned 1979-1989:

‘Alien’ (1979)
‘Altered States’ (1980) ‘The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
‘The Thing’ (1982)
‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983)
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984)
‘Dune’ (1980) ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) ‘Brazil’ (1985)
‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
‘Aliens’ (1986)
‘The Fly’ (1986)
‘Robocop’ (1987)
‘Near Dark (1987)
‘They Live’ (1988)

And I’m still unable to think of a good sf movie for 1989.

Since some of the best sci-fi of the passing decade has occurred on the small screen, I couldn’t resist listing a few television shows, if only because their effect on our pop-culture was indelible. In no particular order:

‘The Man from Earth’ (2007)
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
“Firefly”
“Battlestar Galactica”
‘Night Watch’ (2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_%282004_film%29
‘Day Watch’ (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_%28film%29
‘Iron Man’ (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28film%29
‘X-Men 2′ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_2_%28movie%29
“Farscape” (1999-2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Many of these moives and shows, I’ve already written about on this site.
Now, none of these entertainments as groundbreaking as any of those eighties movies, but I just needed a place to start this thing.

During the week, I’ll make an attempt to justify my choices, but in the meantime, I’ll ask readers in the audience to recommend their own science-fiction favorites or offer their own recommendations from a faded

Before that damnable show went off the air 6 years ago, all of the major broadcast networks — NBC, ABC and CBS each tried to catch some of Chris Carter’s alt.conspiracy.ufo fire.

Fringe‘s distinction is that the show is hard science-fiction, a rare event for network television — HARD science-fiction, is based on real science, not fantasy, not urban mythology and not old Saturday matinée fare. Though there are plenty of whiz-bang moments in there, most of the spectacle on Fringe is derived from current available technology.

One of Fringe‘s few shortcomings is its superficial resemblance to the X-Files. During the pilot, Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Australian actress Anna Torv) and Special Agent John Scott (Mark Valley) of the FBI are called out to investigate the mysterious circumstances where a plane full of passengers is all evacuated by a flesh-melting virus.

After investigating the plane, the Agents are led to a storage unit rented by one of the passengers thought responsible for the downed plane. Scott is infected by the biological agent and Agent Dunham is required to enlist the assistance of noted ‘Fringe’-scientist, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who’s been locked-up in an asylum for the past 17 years.

That’s where the X-Files similarities end, because Fringe is not a Mulder/Scully ‘shipper show, but an ensemble show that rounds out with the son of Dr Noble, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick), and actors Kirk Acevedo and Blair Brown in supporting roles.

While the X-Files was content to meander into the occult, urban legends and UFO lore, Fringe remains firmly planted in the realm of viable, cutting-edge, so-called fringe-science While I can’t vouch for the ‘Altered States‘-like sensory-deprivation tank, the flesh-eating virus, the gas attacks and the genetically-engineered parasite of subsequent episodes are all currently viable technologies.

That said, Torv, Jackson and Noble are compelling character-actors who fill out an hour’s wort of television in interesting ways — Jackson and Noble have and ongoing Father-Son shtick, while Torv’s character has ongoing encounters with the bits of Scott’s personality that were left behind in her head after the aforementioned isolation-tank experience.

Let’s hope the show maintains it’s strong ratings when the show returns in January ’09.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I can’t believe that I sat on the 13 episodes of the first season as long as I did. Actually, I can — my estimation of AMC as a broadcast network is so low, that yes, I’d second-guess anything that they’d broadcast after 20 years of PG-edited, non-Turner ‘American Movie Classics’ — (‘Quigley Down Under‘, anyone?) — that we’ve enjoyed with commercial interruption for the past 5 years.

Somehow, AMC come into the epic bildungsroman that is ‘Mad Men’.

‘Mad Men’ is the story of Dan Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative director at Sterling-Cooper, a mid-level advertising firm on Madison Avenue, c. 1960. Draper is a successful man, keeping an office full of young turks from staking out his corner office, even while he holds down a picture-perfect family in Ossining and alternate in-town mistresses. He is also veteran of the Korean War and a man with a past, apparently risen from his dust-bowl roots by luck and willpower alone. As the show goes on, it peels away at Draper’s history even as it reveals the dynamic of his workplace, his co-workers, clients and other firms that would like to lure him over from Sterling-Cooper.

Now, I haven’t read any other reviews of this show — haven’t been curious until just now — but ‘Mad Men’ is the quintissential American story that The Sopranos was marketed as for so many years. But not all Americans are Italian, nor are all Italians involved with organized crime. David Chase’s 6 season, 8 year show was ultimately an homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s twisted metaphor for American manifest destiny, but again, most American are neither Italian, nor mafiosi.

Given the scope of both shows, it should be of no surprise that Weiner worked on The Sopranos for 3 years as both a writer and producer. What sets Weiner’s show apart from Chase’s is that ‘Mad Men’ takes place at the beginning of our modern era, when America’s white-collar professionals were still coming into their own.

As head writer and show-runner for ‘Mad Men’, Weiner uses the tropes of one genre as the set-piece of another. On one hand, the sunny rooms of suburban households were the setting for light comedies — “I Love Lucy”, “The Donna Reed Show”, and “Leave It to Beaver” – while the workplace portions of the show play like the filmization of some dog-eat-dog Ayn Rand novel. In general, the show feels like a serialized Douglas Sirk film — ‘Written on the Wind’(1956) or ‘Imitation of Life’ (1959) — brightly-lit set-pieces, full of crisp technicolor, an extraordinary accomplishment in terms of art direction, musical choices and period costume design.

But ‘Mad Men’ isn’t a racial melodrama as much as it speaks to the nascent sexism, racism, classism and antisemitism of the period.

As a show, Mad Men‘s 1960 is a strange rear-view mirror to look upon a now-alternate Rat-Pack reality where America is once again in ascendancy, three-martini lunches are common, cigarettes mandatory, marital infidelity a contagion and John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was a scandal compared to Nixon’s apparent corn-fed integrity.

“Mad Men” is especially interest in in 2008, given the forces that would like to see America return to a simpler, more ‘conservative’ time. It may be on AMC, but it sure as hell looks like HBO, especially if you’re watching it on DVD.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

“Mad Men” airs on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. EST/9p.m. Central. Season 2 started on July 27, 2008. Episodes are available on numerous OnDemand cable services and via iTunes.

An amazing scene from the Season 1 finale, just to whet your appetite:

But The Middleman isn’t just some dime-store comic book property, it’s a fun, literate and self-conscious treatment of semi-secret agents, superheroes and villains, a pop-culture confiture that rivals anything Joss Whedon and the Gilmore Girls ever offered up in zither’s fast-paced talk-fests. While I’ve not read the comic book, it is said to be ingenious.

Grillo-Marxuach is also the creator and veteran producer of such shows as “Medium” (2005), “Lost” (2004), and the short-lived “Boomtown” (2002). Middleman is probably best characterized as a reprise of the original Patrick McNee iteration of The Avengers, but updated and self-deconstructing as Grillo-Marxuach and his team name drop cult memes as varied as Stuart Gordon and The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency without skipping a beat. Middleman is admirably tongue-in-cheek fare for an audience that can appreciate the absurdity of modern ‘reality’ television as well as the buddy-dramedy Secret Agent shows of yesteryear, from ‘Wild, Wild West’ to , yes, ‘Get Smart’.

Though the parent network, ABC has picked-up a few similarly quirk-filled shows during the past several years (‘Dirty Sexy Money‘, ‘Lost’ and ‘Pushing Daisies‘ come to mind) it has chosen to bury Middleman on ABC Family along with the provocative ‘Kyle XY’. One would think that clones, robots and The 700 Club wouldn’t mix well, yet ABC Family has chosen to program all of these shows on the same network.

Why ABC Family would relegate an ambitious new genre show to a para-religous network is anyone’s guess, but the results of moving an engaging, family-friendly show from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on in the gulag of para-religious basic cable can only be interpreted as willful sabotage.

Fact of the matter is that the real audience for this show would be the comic-book savvy Buffistas, Browncoats and former Farscape fans, if not the fans of SciFi Channel’s ‘Eureka‘.

Middleman stars Matt Keeslar in the titular role as a gadget-wielding superhero of sorts who is out to defend the world from mad scientists, criminal organizations and rogue daytime television hosts with the assistance of his able lieutenant, Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales).

In the first episode, Wendy and the Middleman go up against a PG-rated tentacled Hentai monster and cybernetically enhanced apes, in that order. Subsequent episodes feature Lucha Libre Wresters, Prada-wearing Succubi, Jewelery-eating aliens and evil daytime talk-show hosts. The dialogue is fast and pithy.